The Fashion of Freedom...

I'm currently doing something I very rarely do, to wit browsing the offerings on a fairly major fashion blog.  Fashion is something that is a non sequitur in my life, I'm about as far removed from that world as it's possible to be.  But fashion is a major power player in many people's lives, sets attitudes, defines directions, and as a philosopher I can't let the person I am limit the scope of my thought concerning the rest of the world. (ok, that one's a keeper, her eyes don't look like the others, and the hat is cool...kieiping a copy of a magazine cover… omg, is this stuff contagious?)

 

 

Anyhow, what I'm noticing most is a serious dichotomy between the primarily feminism inspired text and the commonalities in what seems to be reflected in the model's eyes, the message riding out to the world on their glance.  The feminist dialog is all about woman as a free creature, self willed, self reliant, responsible for her own actions and her own fate, and yet to my eyes the ladies in the pictures are usually projecting some mixture of a thought formed on a line running between the pathos of "help me, help me please, I'm being crushed by this endless meaningless charade"  and  the irresponsible arrogance of "I can do as I damn well please because you can't see me, I'm invisible, I'm safe, all you can see are my clothes." 

Seems like a pretty damn good jump between the two, the attitudes of feminism and the attitudes of fashion.  Yea, the kind of a jump even old Evil Knieval would have thought twice about.  Makes me wonder if fashion has become the foil of feminism, makes me wonder if the feminists of the world are totally exploiting fashion, and the women who are the slave victims of fashion, as the ultimate negative example of what feminism says a truly liberated woman is supposed to be all about.  I mean really, how can a woman feel herself a free and liberated creature if all society has to do to enslave her thought is have someone say "this is how you should look" and she is compelled by a lifetime of compliance into overhauling her wardrobe?  Hmmmm...

But then again, I don't suppose the jump between fashion and feminism is any more severe than the jump between the old male establishment's desire to marry a virgin so her ignorance will allow him to keep a veteran lady of the evening for his mistress.  Looks to me like the two contradictions run a very, very similar wave-form and polarity, all things allowed for.  People.  Give me a hatful of hot nitro glycerin, I know what to do with that.  But the contradictions society impresses on people are substantially less stable, and a whole lot trickier to work with. Oh, well.